Presentation Skills

Why and how to give an awesome presentation

I’m feeling productive today, so here’s another post – this time a shorter one!

Many academics are not very good presenters. Or can you say you’ve never attended a boring lecture or lesson? If you can, I suspect you happen to be an extremely eager and attentive person. I really envy you.

The rest of us – the normal human beings – know this feeling:

It’s not about boring-ness

Anyway, poor stage-skills can also hurt the presenter in question. A famous experiment in the 70s featured an actor posing as a scientist, and giving a series of lectures to an audience of MDs and PhDs. The catch?

The factual contents of the presentations was total bullshit: full of contradictions and scientific jargon with little actual meaning. By contrast, the actual presentation – stage presence – of the actor was engaging and enthusiastic, a real joy for the audience.

Afterwards, the lecture was evaluated by the audience. The actor – despite knowing barely anything about the topic, and intentionally trying to confound the information given on the slides – was graded as high as the real scientist used as control.

Good news for con-artists? You bet!

What it is about

However, it could also be an important lesson for anybody ever having to present their work, or to teach anybody. That would be all academics, and the majority of white-collar workers.

If good presentation skills can turn complete nonsense into a “good” lecture, just imagine what will happen when both the contents and the marketing are spot-on. You’d be an academic super-star.

Of course, not all of us all actors, and acquiring an actor-like stage-presence would probably require a considerable amount of practice. Far more than would be feasible while maintaining your actual career, I’d guess. Never mind the actual talent required, or the lack of it for many of us.

Still, every step in the right direction counts. Between two presentations with identical factual contents, the one with the better delivery wins. Even if it’s only by the length of locking eyes with the audience every once in a while.

Practising your set beforehand, and having a clean and tidy outfit should be pretty much given. In my experience, they are very often not.

Likewise, making your voice loud and clear also helps. So does changing your tone and pitch every now and then, to stress some important or surprising point. Or just to snap those drowsers in the middle row back to the world of the awake.

Finally: smile! Goes for life outside auditoriums as well.

The winner takes all

Implementing all these small tricks at the same time would alone give you a nice head start against your competition fellow professionals. And everybody has heard the joke about bears and running shoes, right? About only needing to outrun your friend and not the bear to survive?

Well, outside the grant-application period we don’t really want out colleagues to be eaten by bears. Still, there’s no downside to striving to be a better presenter. And these minimal requirements I just listed are really easy to implement almost right away.

Of course it goes way beyond that, from presentation techniques to your actual physical bearing and composure. But those are a subject for another post.

Until then. Whenever that may be…

-Antti

Presentation Skills